5 Reasons to Let Professionals Handle Your Auto Insurance Customer Communications
It is no surprise that manual processes are outdated, daunting, time-consuming, and extremely expensive. They also require your constant attention, newly updated tech, and much more. The list is endless!
Businesses are constantly dealing with low ROI and hampered client satisfaction due to delayed communications. They require a better way to improve interactions—one that would save your organization time, effort, and resources.
Let us take an example of one of our clients, let’s call him Michael. He is the Vice President of Customer Relationships in an auto insurance firm. His vision is to improve customer communications while maintaining a human touch. Also, he wants to try different techniques and tools to assist him during the process.
Michael acknowledges that: The automation market within the insurance sector will be worth CAD 40.1 billion by 2030.
However, can automation allow auto insurance businesses to centralize operations, boost productivity, and cut expenses? Is automating processes the best way to streamline client communications in this industry? Let’s explore these answers below!
5 Reasons for C-Suites to Consider Hiring Professionals for Auto Insurance Customer Communications
As an insurance business, you already have a lot on your plate. Speaking of client communications in the insurance sector, organizations must follow the necessary regulations, mandating them to notify clients about specific updates or changes.
In Canada, provincial regulators like the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of Ontario (FSRA) or Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF) in Québec require insurers to maintain transparent communication with policyholders. They must inform customers of their rights, explain claim decisions, and provide clear guidance on how to file a complaint or appeal through their provincial regulator or the General Insurance OmbudService (GIO).
It is one of the many examples of how insurance firms are required to keep their policyholders updated about many things. Of course, their client communications also include sending invoices, statements, renewal notices, and marketing materials. The most crucial aspect is sending these correspondences on time and storing proper proof of mailing, which businesses can achieve by usingCanada Post Registered Mail.
Auto and other insurance organizations are tasked with improving such interactions. Furthermore, they want to make a solid impact on their customers.
Harry Selfridge said, “People will sit up and take notice of you if you will sit up and take notice of what makes them sit up and take notice.”
So, what can you do differently? You can find and employ the best techniques and platforms to help you boost policyholder interactions, like automating the process! Automation is a tried-and-tested path that allows you to centralize all customer communications in a way that
- Customers receive all the information on time.
- You are able to fulfill customer demands or requests promptly.
- You leverage these correspondences to upsell and cross-sell.
- You create a brand reputation out of your impeccable customer service.
Fact Check: Over 30% of customers switch their insurers after a year after encountering one unsatisfactory claim experience.
As our client, Michael said, “We had created the perfect auto insurance solutions with our target audience in mind. Yet, most people complained about the delay in getting a claims-related response and claimed it killed the purpose of buying insurance from us.”
He added, “We had to sit back and think about how to improve the client experience. We had the product + the audience. All we needed to find was a binding compound to keep them together. We found that automation was the best solution, and immediately outsourced the task.”
Below are the most compelling reasons to let professionals manage your customer communications:
Operational Efficiency and Promptness
Automated Processes: 80% of companies will adopt intelligent automation by 2025! This figure shows that organizations will scale and boost operations using automated solutions.
Outsourcing client communication to a professional agency that automates your process can do wonders for your brand. It can allow you to respond faster than you would originally do, increasing client satisfaction.
Additionally, it works on your operational agility by letting you communicate with clients without disrupting your daily workflows. It helps create a parallel line between your business and customer correspondence, each of which keeps running smoothly without bothering the other.
Faster Response Times: Businesses can reduce response times by 50% using automation. Also, your sales staff is 21x less likely to convince leads to buy from you if you take more than five minutes to respond to their queries or questions.
These statistics highlight how crucial being prompt is! Thus, outsourcing becomes a must to ensure all responses go out on time.
Data-Driven Insights and Analytical Reporting
Sources say that data-driven firms are 19x more likely to generate profits, 23x more likely to get customers, and 6x as likely to retain them. We cannot ignore how big data has been transforming the way organizations operate and succeed!
Outsourcing will enable you to access detailed analytics to measure your communication strategy’s performance. It will help you make better decisions, like choosing a channel, messaging frequency, and more.
Also, these experts could bring you predictive insights to determine your target audience’s behavioral traits. You can use these datasets to personalize client correspondence and boost engagement.
Adherence to Regulatory Rules and Reduced Risk
Professional agencies can do a better job of aligning your customer communications with local, state, and federal laws. They can allow you to comply with PIPEDA in Canada and the relevant regulations in countries where your clients might reside.
It provides an overall solution to help you navigate the complicated legal landscape and prevent data breach-related penalties.
Please note that a data breach might cost you CAD 4.5 million on average!
Letting professionals handle the task on your behalf will not only let you remain compliant but also save money, which brings us to our next point!
Save on Expenses
According to the Harvard Business Review, businesses can cut costs by up to 30% by outsourcing non-core tasks. Since you can eliminate overhead expenses and labor costs, you can see significant cost savings in no time.
Also, you can scale your communications easily when you have enlisted the services of a professional vendor.
For instance, PostGrid’s print and mail API lets you send hundreds of thousands of offline mailers at once, making you eligible for bulk discounts.
Improved Customer Experience
You can entirely focus on being there for your clients and do your best to streamline communications. However, this process consists of numerous manual and daunting tasks that might lead to errors.
For instance, imagine you forgot to send a premium payment reminder to a client and canceled their policy. Will that help you gain the client’s trust ever again? No. In fact, it might lead to a series of negative reviews, negative word-of-mouth publicity, and lost leads.
Outsourcing enables you to prevent these situations by entrusting the task to a professional. They can prioritize client communication for your auto insurance business when you cannot! It also frees you up from the responsibility and lets you focus elsewhere, like creating new marketing strategies or contributing to product development.
Source: Fortra
Fact Check: The average open rate for email is only 34.2 to 40.5% compared to direct mail which has a whopping open rate between 57.5 and 85%.
Thus, opting for direct mail over email for sending crucial, time-sensitive auto insurance communications makes sense!
Also Read: Auto Insurance Cancellation Letter: Meaning and How to Send the Insurance Policy Cancellation Letter
Key Considerations When Choosing a Professional Service for Auto Insurance Customer Communications
- Check whether the vendor helps you get the best features and benefits at reasonable prices when shipping client communication materials.
The purpose of outsourcing communications to a third party is to cut expenses considerably. Inquire about the package prices in advance and choose a service with the most reasonable rates for the solution they provide.
- Determine whether this professional service provider allows you to send non-generic letters, postcards, payment reminders, documents, etc.
Generic messages are a big no. People don’t want to receive a spam mailpiece that doesn’t even have their name.
- Consider whether you get a competitive advantage by using the service.
You should be able to boost your customer communications in terms of speed, efficiency, quality, and a well-thought-out client experience. Choose a solution that provides the best features, letting you check these points.
- Choose a service provider that allows you to secure your data and remain compliant.
Look into professional services that are PIPEDA-compliant and have in-built security measures, like high-grade encryption and customizable user permissions.
- Determine whether you can customize your communication materials.
Insurance businesses must be able to create and send custom client communications based on their requirements and objectives. Select a vendor that makes customization easy, allowing you to select the type of direct mailer, envelope, mailing option, etc.
- Know whether your service provider is reliable and can keep up with the decided deliverables.
Compare two or more options to check which one of them is the most dependable solution. You should be able to send any number of correspondence materials to any client anywhere in the world. Check if your selected vendor can provide this level of dependability and on-demand flexibility.
- Consider choosing a professional company that can help cleanse your database.
You can only master client interactions when you have their updated details. So, choose a vendor that validates your customers’ delivery addresses, allowing you to easily send any document, letter, or marketing item without hassles.
Our client, Michael, stated that
“Be mindful of how you go about automation because a good vendor can perform magic, whereas others can make the process even more complicated. We were glad to have found PostGrid to centralize our offline client communications.”
Common Challenges of Handling Auto Insurance Customer Communications In-House
Marketing
In-House Challenge: It is hard to incorporate marketing elements into the correspondence materials.
Automation Solution: It is easy to incorporate marketing messages into your mailers using variable data printing and a scalable API. Automation allows you to create better and more tailored client experiences.
Also, 86% and 71% of B2B and B2C customers, respectively, want brands to know their personal information during their buying journey for higher personalization. Luckily, automation can resolve the issue of not being able to tailor client communications enough!
Expenses and Time
In-House Challenge: In-house processes are prone to errors and wasted time.
Automation Solution: When you rely on an automated solution to do the job instead, you save 3.6 hours weekly. Another study shows that your finance team can save 25,000 hours of reworking something due to manual mistakes by automating processes. It also translates to an approximate saving of CAD 878,000.
Brand Loyalty
In-House Challenge: It is more complex to build brand loyalty due to delayed communications caused by in-house, traditional processes. You are more focused on sales and marketing, pushing you away from curating a satisfying client experience.
Automation Solution: Outsourcing client communications can easily build brand loyalty by using triggered campaigns and sending timely messages, which is otherwise difficult to accomplish.
Multi-Channel Communications
In-House Challenge: It is rarely possible for your staff to be able to combine two or more customer communication channels due to a lack of resources.
Automation Solution: It is always possible to branch out your communication media with seamless integrations. The multi-channel communication services industry is set to reach CAD11.62 billion globally by 2030. It proves that customers are demanding more meaningful and well-planned communications across channels of their choice. Automation brings this goal to life!
Customer Support
In-House Challenge: Slow and unorganized in-house processes can negatively impact your customer support performance.
Automation Solution: Auto insurance businesses can expect prompt, streamlined, and documented customer support operations when they outsource them to a professional.
For example, print and mail tools allow you to manage your user permissions as needed. You can let your customer service team contact clients and reply to inquiries promptly, boosting the department’s performance.
P.S. Outsourcing your client communications can always yield positive results in innumerable ways! It can stop you from getting too involved in boring, repetitive tasks that you can easily automate.
Other Use Cases You Can Consider When Outsourcing Client Communications to a Professional
Nudge Policy Holders Who Need to Renew Services
It can cost you five times more to get new clients compared to retaining them! Thus, sending a direct mail reminder to inform policyholders their renewal dates are near is better than focusing on new leads.
Outsourcing client communication to PostGrid’s direct mail API would mean you can set up triggered campaigns. It lets you automatically send printed reminders to respective clients a month or week before their renewal date. You can help clients avoid lapsed policies and uninsured by sending timely reminders, which becomes easier and more efficient when you outsource.
Embed QR Codes to Simplify Enrolments
Having a third party handle your correspondence tasks allows you to add responsive or interactive elements to your messages. For instance, Michael added customized QR codes to all direct mail postcards and letters going out from his auto insurance company. It redirected prospects to dedicated landing pages, prompting them to sign up or buy a policy.
Re-Engage Former Policyholders
After covering current and potential clients, let’s move on to past policyholders. These are customers who had a policy with you but never renewed or stopped paying the premium until a lapse.
Normally, your staff would have little time to tend to them! However, outsourcing makes reconnecting with past policyholders a breeze. It enables you to send tailored, high-value pieces to win their trust, loyalty, and business back!
Send all Correspondence Materials
An auto insurance business would have tons of communication materials to send to clients. Preparing, printing, assembling, presorting, and shipping each can hamper their operations. So, why not outsource the whole process?
You can send
- Renewal notices
- Claim payment checks
- Product offers
- Welcome letters
- Claim status inquiry responses
- Documentation requests
- Cancellation letters
- Change of policy conditions
Multi-tasking can reduce your staff’s productivity by up to 40%.
Having your employees juggle between sending all the above correspondences and more (after getting the necessary approvals from different departments) can hurt your business. And outsourcing this task to a professional agency reverses the effect—after all, this is what they do best!
Source: Workflow
Pay Attention to the Competition
Hundreds of insurance companies come up in the Canada each year!
The increased competition is proof that businesses must step up their marketing game as well as how they treat their clients. Luckily, automating communications by employing a professional vendor’s aid can take most of the workload off your shoulders and help you deal with it.
How PostGrid Can Help?
Once you recognize the significance of outsourcing your auto insurance customer interactions, you might ask—Which service can I get started with?
Well, PostGrid’s direct mail API helps clients send data-driven, custom, and high-quality mailers. You can integrate our API into your CRM to automatically send the necessary documents or correspondence items to relevant clients at scale. No need to buy printing materials or have your staff print thousands of letters daily.
Request a demo to get started with outsourcing your auto insurance client communications from the comfort of your home or office!
